A tough-minded view of hope, from Laurie Penny, in Wired. Worth a read, in this era of unpredictability.
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the big news comes out
of the arctic: but nobody wants to hear about the arctic – there’s only like – what? – five reindeer herders up there – and maybe santa and some elves – i mean, come on! no, you don’t want to hear about the arctic. so, we don’t talk about the arctic on this poem. but closer to home, at the univ. of kansas, today is “stop day” – no classes! no exams! – not to be confused w/ “day zero,” which is a thing now: it’s the day yr town, city, or country runs out of h2o. if it’s not “word of the year” this year, it’ll be “phrase of the year” – or if not this year, soon, b/c wherever you are, day zero is nearer than u think. sure, it sounds a little like dies ire, but it’s not, b/c mother earth doesn’t get mad she just gets even – but not evenly: most of the world is ok today, but southern africa descends into famine; namibia’s reservoirs at 19% of normal; zambia stopped hydroelectricity from dam of largest reservoir in the world (not so full, tho: only 10% of usable storage); 5.5 m in s. sudan face famine after years of drought & months of deluge; & it blizzards in iceland as it heatwaves in alaska; & australia . . . omygod, australia . . . chaos: hottest place in the world yesterday, w/towns in the interior flat out of water; brushfires spread over the east coast (pumping 275 tons of co2 into the air), temps in the hi 90s while the country’s s.e. flash floods (super- cell on the “sunshine coast”); plus “biblical” inundations in: zwazulu natal, trinidad, murcia, bogotá, & other places u.s.americans don’t even bother to google; hottest nov. ever in new zealand; 95f at dawn in bueos aires. the end. meanwhile, back in the rest of the world, we hope the COPout-25 produces action – we’re cautiously optimistic, you know? what with greta thunberg and all? (she’s person of the year! that’s progress, right?) & if the experts don’t fix it, we won’t know what hit us, so why worry live in the moment w/ the food and water we’ve got so, jesus, joe, don't ruin it for everyone! White male, 72, northeastern Kansas, United States. Recorded Dec. 12, 2038.
The big shots on Wall Street started getting freaked out well before that, you know, and then it was the crash, the Great Compression. Luckily, they kept me on at the University (see, on paper there was still tenure – and still courts), even though the – what? – 200 or so of us left, with maybe 15 departments – were teaching 5 courses a semester, even with the student numbers way down. And the pay cuts. But most of the neighbors couldn’t find work – they looked at me a little funny, when I saw them. I guess a few still have gardens and collect rainwater. People started driving a little less than they had because they couldn’t afford it, which is nice, I guess; but of course it didn’t help us. I tried to get everybody in the neighborhood to pull together, start finding new hardy plants to grow for food, chip in on a water well, even form a little self-defense group. People seemed agreeable for a while, but nothing much came of any of it. People still like their privacy and independence, I guess. I just hope they know what they’re doing. Let’s see – what else? Like most everybody, we had to close off the downstairs of our house because of the New Floods at the start of the 2030s. But the smell is still bad, from the ones that got in, don’t you know; especially from March-December, when it’s hottest. Fortunately, dengue is still fairly isolated in the southeast of the state, but right afterwards, when there’s still standing water, it can get dicey. And of course, it’s spreading north. When the turbine worked and we had connectivity, I’d get on Nextdoor to find out what was going on. Neither the Proud Boys or the Land Sharks had moved into the neighborhood yet, though some newbies and hangers-on shook down a few people a little bit for money, water, gas. As long as we don’t get caught in the middle of one of their fights we’re generally OK. What could we do? Move to higher ground? And do what – build our own house on some abandoned land? The hills camps on the hills are getting crowded, and it still floods in the wet season & bakes you in the hot. Nobody would buy this land even if they had the money for it. We’re not going to start walking north like all the others: shit, I’m past 70 and my wife’s well into her 60s. We’re in pretty good shape – we can walk a long way; but – could we make it to Canada in this heat? We’d definitely have to have a lot of water, and even if we could get it, we couldn’t carry it all. And if we carried cash, we’d get robbed, for sure. And a lot of migrants get caught in the floods, when they’re not dying of thirst. I don’t think we could do it. I feel sorry for the younger people who came in from the coasts and from the burned-over districts out west – some of them were just starting out, with families . . . We tried putting some of them up. Two of the families were just lovely, very grateful, willing to help out a little around the house. But the guy in that third group – I think he must have been on something – things got ugly, and it was a hell of a thing to get them out. And now the others have moved on. Maybe we’ll just check out. That might be best for everybody – we’d be out of this mess and it’d leave more food & water for the young people. But wouldn’t that mean giving up – not just on us, but on all of us? I was a professor of the humanities (which now sounds a little ironic to say nowadays), so can I give up on humanity? Shouldn’t we stick around as long as we can to try to do what we can for whomever we can? Hell, I don’t know. I wonder if people had known how bad things would get, if they would’ve done different. Knowing people like I do now? Prob'ly not. “how’s your climate
stuff going?” someone asks; “you tell me,” i say. read all about it!: the history of the history of the present today, at 38°58′18″ n 95°14′06″ w it’s sunny, winds s 5 mph; 32 f; wind chill 27; air quality: good. rainfall 10” > norm for year. in these parts, this time of year, it doesn’t get much better than that; plus, we’re 875 ft. above sea level, in the middle of a continent. why think about climate crisis on such a winter’s day? how’s your climate stuff, reader? well . . . if you’re in buenos aires, the aires are around 99 f; if you’re in rio, expect “flooding of streams, rivers, trees crashing and increased traffic jams”; if you’re in s. africa, your neighborhood may be submerged & your power, out, but the drought has packed the soil so hard that rainfall à runoff, not mud; if you’re a coffee farmer pretty much anywhere, higher temps leave yr trees scorched & diseased; if you’re an australian farmer, you probably won’t be very long, if this drought continues (the “most severe in recorded history,” sez the u.n. weather v.p.); if you’re in perth, you sweat (104 f); if in sydney, you suck in smoke (10 x the “hazardous” level – 7.5 m acres alight), & maybe you don yr gas mask & join the 1000s protesting climate denial, or maybe you turn up the a/c & stuff towels under the doors; if in anchorage, you enjoyed yr warmest dec. day ever! & you’re warming 2x faster than the rest of us – not so much of that nasty cold weather anymore! if you’re in central or east africa, you probably aren’t reading this, but trying to stay dry or hauling all yr stuff to a refugee camp, if you aren’t buried under a mudslide somewheres & here . . . well, here cedars & mosses still show green, sweet everlasting sweetens prairies, & thousands of geese & gulls sink, downward to water, on extended wings White male, 72, northeastern Kansas, United States. Recorded Dec. 10, 2038.
It took a while for things to . . . well, to get pretty uncomfortable. Or as a friend said to me, he said, “shit is getting real.” That’s just how he said it: “shit is getting real.” First it was the irritations and annoyances. Ragweed growing and blooming longer, and so did hay fever. When it rained torrentially, there were more mosquitoes; when the winters were especially mild, there were oak mites in late summer. The county roads became impassable for weeks at a time, after the bomb cyclones. Of course, despite the rains, the grass didn’t make it through the summer, it was harder to keep the garden alive, and it wasn’t very pleasant to be outdoors, most days of the year. Fewer birds. Then the water starting creeping into our house when the downpours came; seemed like they were harder and faster and longer every time. And the healthy tree that was blown down on our roof by one of the straight-line winds – that cost us a lot. This was when you could still get homeowner’s insurance, and that paid for most of it. And fortunately, it could have been worse if there hadn’t been all the climate refugees desperate for work – even the President’s shoot-to-kill policy couldn’t keep back that many people – and Central America was getting drier, more anarchic. I guess they figured they’d die anyways, esp. with the gangs setting up provisional “governments.” And then there was folks from the coasts were having to move inland. Then the droughts and floods started knocking the bottom out of ag. You can only go so many years with a 50% yield. The Ogallala was practically dry – and what was left was too saline and expensive to pump – and further east, the Missouri flooded pretty much every year. So more small producers sold out to Big Ag. So, we were dealing with scarcity, but on top of that, monopoly: a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk started going for $10 (and we thought that was bad!). And we thought we were in pretty good shape, what with Clinton Lake. But it started sinking, which meant water fees went up a good 40% in the short term (esp. since the rich folks were paying the city officials a little extra for a lot more). And because the power plant used so much water, we started having the blackouts – which were permanent for the folks who couldn’t pay their bills, who were becoming more numerous. It was like they were squatting in their own homes, the ones who didn’t get evicted. Mind you, this was all before Hurricane Clemente plowed up the Houston Ship Channel and knocked out most of the refineries for good. They said capacity would be restored within two years, but gas is $8.50 a gallon and has been going up, so I’m not holding my breath, esp. since they’re saying this hurricane season will be worse than last year. When will the gas run out? That’s what we want to know. the problems of two people
don’t amount to a hill of beans – or flood debris – in this crazy mixed-up world – i have to keep reminding myself of this, have to keep reminding myself to do what needs doing today, around the house or at the job, as well as prepare for what today will be like tomorrow & after years of tomorrows, like learning how to pickle acorns & getting good enough at spanish that i can interpret for displaced persons . . . hi yesterday 53f, 10˚ ↑ norm; as for today’s today, 35f right now – forecast 27 by 6 pm: typical kansas weather, only moreso . . . meanwhile, after the u.s.’ wettest spring ever, australia’s driest spring ever, springs drying up, rivers empty, > a dozen towns in n.s.w. water- less: we’re a “tinderbox waiting to go up,” she sez, as she waits on her porch for the water truck – landscape of cracked brown earth w/a few green oasis where farmers have the money to irrigate; brisbane has hottest dec day ever; video of “firenado” rolling across queensland, as 100 bushfires burn; while in victoria, three escape control & grow & grow, as heat heads towards 110f, as – (fun fact, first-world folks: california now spends $5b/yr on firefighter salaries) + 16 humans buried under landslides in uganda; beira, mozambique is underwater, & just when you think things are hopeless, e. africa finally gets another cyclone; at the same time, “21,000 cattle lost to drought” in zimbabwe; in one part of s. africa, dead fish on a dried-up lake; while n. cape had drought, now deluge; & victoria falls a trickle of its former self; mean- while in sri lanka, 10k people flee rising waters in island’s e. & n.; 4k in w. java likewise evac’d; 66k in phillipines, villages cut off by landslides; & i won’t mention the 56 polar bears that showed up at a russian village, b/c on this poem, we do not talk about polar bears . . . but in chile’s atacama desert, all is a-bloom, after 4 mo. of freak rainfall – mighty purty – b/c, as the neoliberal pundits are so fond of saying: “there will be winners & there will be losers” – meaning they will be the winners, b/c they set the whole thing up, this crazy mixed- up world So, every other weekday since April, I’ve posted an entry in verse summarizing some of the more notably cataclysmic weather events of the previous 48 hours or so. The reasons for my doing this are complex, from making a few more people more aware of the daily effects of the climate emergency to just keeping my hands busy.
The title, “Poem of Our Climate,” is a play on the title of Wallace Stevens’ “The Poems of Our Climate,” which is not exactly about climate per se. Indeed, it’s more about the imagination (and, by implication, the human being’s dissatisfaction with even the most comfortable surroundings). When Stevens wrote that “the imperfect is so hot in us,” he had no idea how literal that statement would become. But, aside from the title, I refer to “Poem of Our Climate” as a “verse chronicle.” The word “poem” just carries too much weight, particularly after the New Critics, with their fetishization of the well-wrought urn of a poem and their desire to sequester poetry from politics and history. What I’m doing is on deadline, in response to things I’ve just read. It is necessarily (for both logistical and thematic reasons) going to be more loose-limbed and occasional than a poem by Elizabeth Bishop or Willie Yeats. “Poem of Our Climate” happens in real time: it is a memorial for the present. And it is a chronicle of unravelling, so tying everything up in a finely-crafted sonnet sequence would seem a little strange anyway. But I didn’t come up with this idea. Poetry used to do most anything prose could do, including commentary on current events. As late as the mid-twentieth century, it was the norm for newspapers to print poetry – sometimes as a commentary on the news, sometimes as a break from it. One newspaper poet who particularly inspires me is Anise (Anna Louise Strong), whose poems ran in the Seattle Union-Record newspaper (the nation’s first labor daily) from 1918-1921.* Strong was a radical labor reporter, and her Anise poems reflected that point of view. They typically take off from a news item in the very paper in which the poem appeared – “I read in the paper that . . . .” The poem might be about a strike or a foreign revolution, or a local election. Often Anise relates these events to events in her own life. The poems are written in columns, in short lines, in a colloquial voice, often incorporating humor, and always addressed to the paper’s very broad readership. I also take inspiration from the historical poems of Ed Sanders – ephemeral, mercurial, jokey, musical, dispersed, and always information-packed. News that stays news? More like history that stays poetry (and vice versa). It’s epic, but not exactly Homer. It is a chronicle, in concentrated poetical (and political) form. And Sanders was heavily influenced by Charles Olson, whose very skinny historical poems about Gloucester, Mass. thread through his opus, The Maximus Poems. Both Anise and Sanders make ample use of the visual aspect of print. Anise interleaves her lines of verse with lines of typographical symbols, such as asterisks or dollar-signs; she makes ample use of CAPITALIZED words for emphasis or defamiliarization. Sanders uses the “open field” of the page (i.e., variable indents, dropped lines, etc.), as well as the occasional hand-drawn sketch. If translated into Chinese and written by hand, they would be in “running script.” Both poets are trying to keep up – with history, that which has already transpired or that which is unfolding before the poet. The lineation is largely a function of the medium. I wanted the lines to appear as written, line-breaks intact, on a mobile device. My mobile device is an iPod touch, which has a very small, skinny screen. In order to get the lines to fit, I decreased the font size and shortened the lines. That, in turn, meant getting over my superstition about beginning and ending lines with prepositions. However, in the process, it forced me to try to compress narration and telescope many events into a small space without (hopefully) losing the sense. It also meant thinking about the rhythmic qualities of mundane phrases; the element of surprise (and upset expectations) that a line break can produce; and the way enjambment can produce both a sense of torrential forward movement and a sense of fractured-ness, at once. And I love numbers, symbols, abbreviations, misspellings, and all such practical rough-and-ready signs, in a poem – esp. since they save space. But why not prose? Well, there’s lots and lots of prose out there about the climate crisis, fiction and non-fiction. Poetry has been a little slow on the uptake, as far as I can tell. Also, there are so many human beings dying every day from events that are directly related to climate chaos; they aren’t kings and queens and generals, so nobody is singing their praises in song and verse. I wanted to do something that would at least honor the fact of their having existed – of our having existed. That’s why I try to avoid caps: we are all being swept away, or dried up and blown away, by global heating. The griot or the bard served the royal court. Who serves the world? Nobody, that’s who. And that’s our problem. _____________________________________________ * For more on the Anise poems, see my Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics. it’s official! – worldwide,
nov. was hottest nov. ever! 6th mo. in a row “to approach or break a temperature record”; they’re frying eggs on the side- walk in brisbane to celebrate; power cuts down under, just like calif. – wildfire prevention; but it’s no use: sydney still shrouded in smoke; fires on outskirts; longest stint of pollution ever in n.s.w. meanwhile e. cape (s. africa) getting 30% of ususal rain – record low, as temps reached record hi’s; charity drilling wells in thirsty villages; in zambia, elephants wander into towns looking for h2o; are “trampling crops, tearing down fences, ter- rifying residents and even injuring & killing them”; & “crocodiles are lunging at people as both man and beast fight over the meagre amounts of water found in the bush”; local man sez "it's very dangerous for the human beings here" (2 m. of whom need food, 7 m. next door in zimbabwe – it’s dangerous for the human being anywhere – but some wheres more dangerous than most) u.n. chief sounds the voice of doom as big-wigs hem, haw, & say “you first” . . . (will 2019 be the second-hottest on record, or only the third? Stay tuned for news at 10) dangerous for the herder in niger who sold his herd at $8/head: “animals were so thin and tired that we had to lift them to get them on their feet” but in kenya, torrents: rivers swell; teenager anna nduku becomes the 130th to die when she falls in, trying to rescue a man; her ma sez: "i wanted to throw her a stick to try and pull her out but the river was swollen and she was being tossed and tossed and then it swept her away" – (the human beings are being swept away, some under the carpet, some just away) meanwhile, “a new report” sez ½ m. people have died in the last 20 yrs by x-treme weather: puerto rico, honduras, haiti, myanmar worst-hit; france in the same risk group as india & madagascar (20k dead in 20 yrs.); germany, japan among those worst mauled in 2018 (affluence does not exempt, it seems) typhoon smashes phillipines; flooding in spain; and now california is inundated, too (101 closed by levee break); missouri r. longest flood stage recorded (8 mo.); t’storms in hong kong 50% ↑ avg., this yr. (59 days); and in england, hi water means the brits cannot get their carrots – ground too wet to use machines how do we fish ourselves out of this mess? get us on our land-legs? birds have shrunk, their wings have grown longer You may have heard of “climate fiction,” sometimes shortened to “cli-fi.” Put is there a counterpart for poetry? “Cli-Po”?
I haven’t found very many poetry books that directly address the climate crisis. There is one anthology I’m aware of that attempts to bring such a sub-genre into focus: Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change (BlazeVOX 2017), edited by Heidi Lynn Staples and Amy King. The book is filled with a wealth of amazing, moving, inventive poems, poetics statements, & pedagogical ideas, revolving around and related to ecopoetics. What strikes me, though, is how indirectly most of these ecopoets address global heating and climate chaos, if they do so at all. Stephen Collis’ “Hockey Night in the Anthropocene” is a clear exception (the title refers to the “hockey-stick” graph showing projected runaway global heating); and there are some pieces that reference an amorphously threatening future, like Suzi F. Garcia’s meditations and the excerpt from Brenda Iijima’s speculative poem Untimely Death Is Driven Out Beyond the Horizon. As for the rest – well, there are poems that address fracking, pollution, violence, imperialism, toxic waste, and more. Or, as Brenda Hillman puts it, in “Crypto-Animist Introvert Activism: a Haibun”: “to protest drones, racism, state killing, the death of species & so on.” Many poems protest aspects of environmental destruction in specific places. And that’s swell. But I have to wonder in what sense these poems are really “thinking climate change” – envisioning it, thinking it through, understanding how it diverges from environmental “issues,” how massive and preemptive it is becoming, or even trying to figure out what “it” is in the first place. Maybe there are plenty of poets facing climate chaos head-on but the editors just weren’t aware of them – there’s a LOT of ecopoetry and protest poetry out there, nowadays – or weren’t the ones they wanted to include in the anthology. Certainly they’re aware of the shelf-full of poetry books about Katrina (which focus primarily on the effects of the disaster on the ground). But I wonder if the issue is really what it means to “think climate change,” and how – and whether – poetry can do that. To my mind, this problem has to do with the difference between weather and climate, between local and global, and the difficulty of linking the former to the latter term. It’s easy to say “think globally, act locally,” if you think you know what it means to “think globally” and can do so. Perhaps the one piece in Big Energy Poets that comes closest is Eric Magrane’s “Biosphere 2, Poetry, and the Anthropocene.”* The title references the famous early 90s experiment, funded by an eccentric millionaire, that attempted to recreate earth’s ecosystems within a huge glass bubble in the Arizona desert. The project was both risible and serious, as Magrane suggests; hubristic and wacky, but at the same time a reminder or admission that we live in the biosphere, not on it – it’s a closed system. Everything is hitched up to everything else, so one could argue that poems about any topic – particularly any environmental or political topic – inevitably eventually relates to climate change, one way or another. Everything’s hitched to everything else, as John Muir said. But that’s why, it seems to me, an ecopoetry that would think – and confront – climate chaos and global heating needs to show how things are hitched up to climate shift – lots of things. It needs to depict the earth as a whole, while at the same time making it apprehensible and palpable to an individual reader in a particular point on the earth. It needs to do that most difficult of tasks: cinching the general to the particular. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Look for Magrane’s guest post here, in May 2020. idea for dystopian movie premise:
americans’ very bodies become commodified throughout their lives & beyond, their every action recorded by secret cameras & mics; blizzards paralyze the country on the biggest travel week of the year; brush-fires burn across australia, as much of the country runs out of h2o; heat records fall; grain harvests plummet; huge chunks of the british coastline fall into the sea; much of the beautiful south of france underwater or mudslides; mudslides kill more people there, in tamil nadu, in kenya; much of eastern and southern africa plunged into famine & hunger by successive drought & deluge; freak tornadoes show up in south africa, n. europe, new zealand; manila airport shut by hurricane; mosquito-borne illnesses creep northward – 100 countries report dengue fever; arctic sea-ice melts at exponential rates, sea-levels rise, flooding more frequent across the globe, climate chaos dis- places millions, fleeing cyclones, wild- fires, flooding. what do you think? no? a little too “out there”? |
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |